Wednesday, November 18, 2009

I'm not going to sport with anyone's patience or intelligence by pretending I found this junk all on my own. The first video was linked off Deadspin and is another product from the good people at Everything Is Terrible! — a blog devoted to sharing edited versions of videos found on old VHS tapes at second-hand stores. They're the people who found the amazingly bad "It's Time for Cat Massage!" and this nugget called "Look What God Made!"

I can't describe the following. Deadspin made a crack about watching this and then checking the water supply for drugs. It's not a bad idea. Everything is wrong with this video: about half a dozen classic children's songs rewritten with terrible slant rhymes; bad interaction with the CGI, even though the CGI is just a baseball animated over a real-life baseball; clumsy voiceover on children frozen with horrifying rictus grins; characters that look like Towelie from South Park; a girl being reassured that a baseball won't hurt her if she gets hit by it because BB the Baseball is "too sweet to hurt anybody"; it goes on.
Some old lady takes a ball to the face, and kids wind up giggling maniacally while staring in their gloves and seeing an animated baseball talking to them. A girl can succeed by being "smarter than the ball," but she's already succeeded by being one of the six people in the video who isn't fat. I think a fat family made this. Whoever was in charge was clearly insane or took frightening children to be his primary objective.

I'm not even sure what the fuck's going on with the next one. Maybe someone wanted to sell shitty software that made kids take pop quizzes about Jesus and mash keys to blast demons away from Microsoft paperclips that quoted the New Testament? There's a dickish kid with a buzz cut that seems to have been put in exile from the group to commune with the computer, and at another point a couple of men dressed like nerf floppy disks gambol around like extras abandoned by a rep theater revival of Lewis Carroll.

Highlights include charmingly naturalistic dialogue like:

GIRL: Wait, I've got a little New Testament right in my pocket!OTHER GIRL: We know a song about that!

The set design seems like a christian knockoff of contemporary secular entertainment done without shame, like someone in the development phase wrote Saved by the Bell on a chalkboard, then crossed out "Bell" and wrote "Lord" over it until everyone around the table started nodding and saying, "Yeah. YEAH."

I really wanted to figure out who was behind this, but the internet failed me yet again. I don't think Colby College was in charge of this, and almost all searches for anything "Colb" brings up a shitload of Birther sites about Obama's certificate of live birth. Apparently this video wound up on a Gawker site the other day, but the staff didn't have anything to say that couldn't be gleaned by looking at Everything Is Terrible! Reading through Gawker's moderator-screened 500-words-or-less audience attempts to be as cooly indifferent as the mostly unfunny staff yielded nothing useful. (Aside from more evidence that irony's quickly becoming like massive reciprocating saws or a recoilless shotgun: something everyone thinks is a lot cooler if they know relatively few people have access to it.)

It's too bad, because this seems like the sort of thing that is probably much more fun if you know more about it. Case in point: two of the commenters on Everything Is Terrible! claimed to have been in school musicals based on whatever Colby is. Someone made a musical about this. That's just awesome. It automatically explains that whole Starlight Express-meets-cylons choreographed sequence when everyone tries to convince the dickish buzzcut atheist kid that he needs to become a robot like everyone else—was there nobody on this project scanning things for unintended meanings?—and then I guess pray to/for/with a soulless device?